It was the 8th of February, and I had Three full days left in Vietnam. I had planned to relax some while spending my last week in Da Nang, but Diem had this way of suggesting we go out for breakfast or coffee, and I’d find myself on another incredible adventure. Today was no different.
We headed across the Han River bridge near the apartment and turned north on Bạch Đằng. We were headed to Trực Lam Viện, a gorgeous restaurant next door to Madame Lân where we had breakfast with the Bào’s before heading to the countryside. Restaurants in Da Nang are incredible things to behold. Almost exclusively outdoors and almost always with the appearance of being in a garden or forested mountain scene. I’ve been fortunate with the weather in my time here, but if you look close enough you can see how everything is prepared for the rain. Always out in the open, yet always covered. Awnings and umbrellas are carefully placed to keep any precipitation and rays of the sun from directly affecting patrons. Incorporated within the trees and foliage within to give everything an incredibly organic feel. Sitting and eating in a restaurant in Da Nang is as unique and special an experience as sitting in the ancient street stalls of Hanoi and having a bowl of spicy noodles.
As we sat in the warm, breezy morning air and enjoyed our breakfast, I noticed something over to the side under a roofed section of the open-air restaurant. It was a model of a no doubt impressive ship had it been scaled to actual size. I excused myself briefly and wandered over to the large replica. After a few questions and five minutes of research, I found this to be a scale model of a 19th-century Artémise class French frigate. The year I was given was 1858, and Da Nang had some claim to importance in the French subjugation of Indochina.
I would later learn that in a coalition effort in September of 1858, 450 Filipino Chasseurs, 550 Spanish Infantry, 1,000 French Marines, 1 dispatch vessel, 5 steam transports, 5 steam gunboats and 2-12 gun corvettes headed by a 50 gun Artémise class frigate known as the Némésis, sailed into what is today known as the bay of Da Nang and opened fire on the forts which protected it’s harbor. It would set off a decade of bloodshed that would ultimately end in the establishment of French Indochina.
After my brief history lesson, we finished up and collected our motorbike from the steward on the street. Most of the busy sections of the city had street stewards who helped you park your motorbike and retrieve it when needed. They were uniformed and professional, giving paper tickets or sometimes little wooden number blocks on keychains for retrieving your two-wheeler later. Their function seemed to be to keep the busy sidewalks organized, tidy, and to deter theft. As we collected our transport, Diễm asked me if I wanted to go to Temple. The answer, of course, was always yes, and I wanted to say something sarcastic. I learned early on that sarcasm is an incredibly misunderstood concept here. So I giggled to a joke in my head that only I was aware of as I climbed on the back of the motorbike and headed south.
If you will remember back to an earlier post “A Sandwich by any other name is simply a sandwich”, I commented on the landscape of limestone cliffs and the temples rising from them south of Da Nang. I didn’t realize till it came into view, but that very temple whose facade I snapped a shot of as we drove by almost 3 weeks ago, was the very temple I was going to now. It wasn’t a temple as much as a site. It was an entire town, for lack of a better word, known as the Marble Mountains. The area contains five mountains made entirely of Limestone and Marble. They are named after the five elements: Kim (metal), Thuy (water), Moc (wood), Hoa (Fire), and Tho (earth). The mountains contain Buddhist and Hindu grottoes carved within their caves as well as countless ancient temples and pagodas on her cliffs. Though mining of the marble and limestone here has been banned for some years now, it explains the endless rows of sculpting houses and mineral shops that line the streets in the shadows of the peaks. You can get the sense when walking the streets that the selling and sculpting of these precious minerals has been going on here for centuries.
We pulled into the road that bisected the town that surrounds these mountains and began looking for a place to put up our motorbike. There wasn’t any parking on the street here, and you had to find a shop or store that had an empty spot. The back of the shops and stores here doubled as makeshift “garages”. You essentially paid to park and have your vehicle watched over while you took in the attractions. It wasn’t a bad deal, but it was a bit overwhelming trying to get out of the shop we parked in as we were treated as if we were a captive audience. The lady who ran the shop was very persistent about us purchasing more than just a parking spot, but with the ever-graceful and resolute Diễm handling the situation, I managed to get out of there with just a bottle of water.
We headed across the street to the market that lay at the base of the mountain known as Thuy. It was the only Mountain in the group that allowed public access, and seeing the challenges of maneuvering around the mountain I could see why. We wandered around the stalls and weaved through the countless counters and racks, all selling what seemed to be the same things. Marble and jade bracelets, countless numbers of sculptures, and figurines ranging in size from an inch to 20 feet in height.
The scope of markets in Vietnam seems, quite simply, to just defy logic and break all the rules of economics and physics. Imagine, if you will, a section of an aisle in your local department store. A section, mind you, not an aisle. So far, for the sake of a commonly shared vision, let’s go with the grooming section. I’m not sure why I chose that section. Arbitrarily, picking something is always difficult. Just stay with me here. So you’ve got some razors, maybe some deodorant, brushes, combs, you know the deal. Now imagine that same store that is filled with nothing but identical versions of that same exact section. All are almost identical but independent of each other, and all fight each other for your business. It explains, in part, why negotiating price is such an integral part of business here and why nothing has a price stamped on it. Competition in this burgeoning capitalist society is always arm’s length away and in every direction. In this world, It really is eat or be eaten. The only problem is, as the consumer, I’m the one on the menu.
For me, this reality only raised further questions and curiosities. Who is making all of this stuff, who is buying all of this stuff, and how is anyone making any money? One thing every local I came into contact with always had was a wad of cash, but hey, you almost had to have a wad of cash for a cup of coffee, so this wasn’t entirely unusual. Technically, you could have 100 bills in your hand and not be able to afford a cab across town. It seems you would need quite a bit of capital to fill your stall. Was this subsidized in some way? Was anyone else paying taxes? Just thinking about this economy and seeing all the systems, markets, and operations play out around me made my head hurt, and I’m sure it would give an IRS agent a heart attack. I digress.
After snagging a few bracelets and trinkets for souvenirs, we headed to the ticket booth. The entire mountain was holy to the Buddhists and Hindus that occupied this site, but access was only permissible through a government-funded access point. A vertical concrete tower had been erected next to the mountain, and a walkway was constructed to connect the tower with the ancient religious structures that dotted the sides of the marble and limestone terraces. You could only buy a one-way ticket up the elevator, and it was, at least as the general public was concerned, the only way onto and off of the mountain. This posed other questions. What if I spent all my money at the top? Would I be afforded a ticket down? Was there an identical booth at the top selling tickets for the elevator ride down? It was just too much to take in, as most things were in this alien world. So Diễm procured our tickets, I stood in amazement as always, and we waited briefly in the queue, boarded the elevator, and then ascended up the cliffs of Thuy, the mountain of marble. 
